France's ancestors the Gauls were a bunch of heathen forest dwellers, with a
penchant for wine, wild boar and roughing up Romans – or so the Asterix
comic books would have us believe.

In fact, they were a highly civilised bunch given a bad press throughout the ages by successive conquerors, notably Julius Cesar.

That is the message from "Les Gaulois", a major exhibition under way at Paris' Cite des Sciences, which debunks popular myths about the Celtic tribes, known collectively as the Gauls, who populated France before the Roman invasion.

Far from the clichés of warmongering hunter-gatherers with winged helmets, the show reveals them to be sophisticated farmers, craftsmen and traders.

It bases its startling conclusions on decades of archaeology, including the uncovering of 500 Gaul sites in the past ten years.

"The Gauls didn't wait for the Romans or Greeks to civilise them," said the archaeologist Francois Malrain, one of the show's curators.

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"They lived in a refined society," he explained. "They were clever farmers and breeders, with a metalworking know-how and dexterity that was unequalled across the whole of Antiquity."

Very little of the Gauls' own version of their history has survived as they wrote it on tablets of wood or wax, so it was up to the Greeks and Romans, and later the Asterix books, to outline their qualities – or lack of them.

"Physically, the Celts have a terrifying aspect, a rough and cavernous voice," the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote at the time. "They use few words and speak in enigmas."

But archeologists have dug up a host of beautiful bronzes from deities to birds of prey, brass boars and Gaul coins with stylised faces.

They had no winged helmets but a 2004 dig in Tintignac, in the Limousin region, uncovered a string of beautifully wrought objects including a curved swan helmet, and a carynx, a ceremonial war trumpet.

Aerial archaeology shows by the third century BC they lived in structured villages – oppidum – with social hierarchies and multi-storey houses for the rich. They cleared forest areas to raise cattle, sheep and pigs.

Dolmens, Obelix's favourite plaything, were nowhere to be seen as they date from the Neolithic period, nor were roast boar.

But Asterix's creators got one thing right: the huge amounts of amphorae found in digs suggest the Gauls did drink large amounts of wine.